Advances in cloud computing and GPU virtualization are
moving the game industry into a cloud gaming era. The basic idea of cloud
gaming is to run games on cloud servers and let players interact with games
through thin clients. In cloud gaming, the service provider needs to maintain a
set of cloud servers for running the game instances requested by the players.
Facing constant workload fluctuations, a primary concern of the cloud gaming
service provider is the total running cost of the cloud servers. This talk will
focus on the problem of how to dispatch the play requests to the cloud servers
so as to minimize the total running cost of the servers. We model the play
request dispatching problem as a new variant of the dynamic bin packing
problem. We analyze the competitive ratios of the classical bin packing
algorithms for this new problem, evaluate the algorithms with real game playing
traces, and propose enhancements to the algorithms.

Bio:

Xueyan Tang is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer
Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He
received the B.Eng. degree in computer science and engineering from Shanghai
Jiao Tong University in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from The
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003. His research interests
include distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile and pervasive computing,
and wireless sensor networks. He has served as an associate editor of the IEEE
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.